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Journal of Popular Culture (2010) - Reading, Guidance, and Cold War Consensus in Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope"

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Abstract

Matthews examines Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. Filmed in twelve continuous takes, Rope is considered one of his lesser films -- a flawed technical experiment and a brief pause before the more commonly accepted "greats" Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1957), and North by Northwest (1959). Examining Rope in conjunction with contemporaneous theories of reading guidance allows audience to read Hitchcock in a context that reveals his Cold War engagement and suggests a "sociological" import to his postwar work. During a time when how one read was equally important to what and why one read, Hitchcock's methods of guiding his audience to a centrist interpretation of his films bore particular political resonances that demand they reexamine the function of his seemingly apolitical films. In all of Hitchcock's postwar films, the audience's reading of the film is shaped by its reading of reading in the film.

Article

Reading, Guidance, and Cold War Consensus in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope.

Filmed in twelve continuous takes, Rope is considered one of Hitchcock's lesser films—a flawed technical experiment and a brief pause before the more commonly accepted "greats" Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1957), and North by Northwest (1959). Despite the excellent work by Robert Corber and others on the sociopolitical import of Hitchcock's postwar work, such dismissal of Rope's aesthetic achievement has led to general critical neglect, particularly with regard to the film's place within Cold War cultural narratives.1 While the film's proximity to World War II and criminalization of Nietzsche might lead one to interpret Rope as a critique of Nazism, the film's preoccupation with authoritarianism in general suggests that it is haunted not only by the specter of recent political horrors, but also by a fear of emerging totalitarianisms. Cold War political leaders repeatedly invoked antifascist sentiment in their efforts to "educate" postwar Americans about communism, concluding as President Truman did that "there isn't any difference in totalitarian states. I don't care what you call them, Nazi, Communist or Fascist" (238). Concerns about a familiar yet unfamiliar foe permeated postwar America's political and cultural consciousness. Indeed, Rope's central tensions typify Cold War paranoia by suggesting that the "enemy" can be a friend, schoolmate, teacher, employer, ex-boyfriend, and neighbor—all who appear "normal." At a time when government officials insisted on the subversive possibility of the invisible enemy, even the normal became potentially dangerous.2 What is interesting with respect to Rope, however, is that this danger was linked to literacy, suggesting that readers or readings that deviate from culturally sanctioned narratives were threats to personal and national security. Postwar reading discourse tied the national imperative to be counted one of the "worthy citizens of tomorrow" to the ability to interpret and "evaluate the facts presented in varied printed forms" in a socially acceptable manner (Witty 15).3 From Mortimer J. Adler's foundational How to Read a Book (1940) to Rudolph Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read (1957), reading guides constructed a narrative of cultural consensus that privileged normative readings over more diverse and radical interpretations.

Significantly, then, Alfred Hitchcock's Cold War films are consistently framed by images and discourse of reading, asserting clearly articulated arguments about individuality, citizenship, and social responsibility. Despite Hitchcock's claims that he does not make "message movies," his postwar protagonists Rupert Cadell, Scottie Ferguson, L.B. Jeffries, and Roger Thornhill are all cast in the guise of a Cold War reader attempting to unravel the complexities and ambiguities of both literal and social texts.4 Hitchcockian reading functions on multiple levels: first, as a literal activity in which an individual scans and comprehends words on a page; second, as a figurative device in which an individual analyzes and interprets behaviors, motives, or ideologies; and third, as a means by which the audience views, internalizes, and processes the film before them. These modes of reading overlap and intersect as both Hitchcock's characters and his viewers are called to read "correctly." Reframing our understanding of this relationship in terms of reading and reading guidance allows us to see how Hitchcock is teaching his audience to read actively: "if the audience does know, if they have been told all the secrets that the characters do not know, they'll work like the devil for you because they know what fate is facing the poor actors" (Let 'em Play God 113).5 Hitchcock emphasizes that he guides his audience's readings by accessing and activating their "natural" emotions and internalized codes for social behaviors. In this sense, Hitchcock is an invisible guide, simultaneously present and absent as he trains his audience to read film.6

Given the political context in which Hitchcock is operating, his disavowal of overt didacticism and his subtle guidance of readers make sense. Training one to read a Hitchcock film, therefore, requires lessons in interpreting "formal" problems as they operate in social and political situations; as George Wilson has famously no...

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Notes

  1. ↑ Critics who attempt to read Hitchcock through a Cold War lens tend to decontextualize the films despite themselves. For examples of such readings, see Thomas M. Leitch's "It's the Cold War, Stupid," George Wilson's "The Maddest McGuffin," and Fredric Jameson's "Allegorizing Hitchcock." My reading hopes to offer a corrective, situating Hitchcock within the rhetoric, ideology, and political unconscious of the post-World War II period, thereby demonstrating how Hitchcock presents his viewers with a new way of reading that engages with and shapes Cold War discourses of reading.
  2. ↑ The subtle menace fueling Rope's tension thematizes the "they are everywhere" mentality best articulated by famed undercover informer Herbert Philbrick: "Where Communism is concerned, there is no one who can be trusted. Anyone can be a Communist. Anyone can suddenly appear in a meeting as a Communist party member—close friend, brother, employee, or even employer, leading citizen, trusted public servant" (qtd. in Schrecker 141).
  3. ↑ In "Changed Role of Reading," Ralph C. Preston argues "part of the job of teaching today is to help students recognize attempts of authors to manipulate people's minds, even when they admire its cleverness or are tempted to be gratified if it is in support of a worthy cause" (15). Preston states that an educational program that strives to teach critical thinking "involves also practice in analyzing such attempts (to manipulate] from government or private sources, business or labor, advertising or news story, pulpit or lecture platform, motion picture or radio" (15 — 16). The efforts to "manipulate" the reader are characterized as un-American, undemocratic, and uncivilized: "teachers can help create an attitude toward manipulation that classifies it as an expression of contempt for civilization" (16). In order to protect the nation, teachers must give students the tools to deassemble dissembling and to construct arguments and ideas for themselves.
  4. ↑ As William Cadbury and Leland Poague suggest in "Hitchcock and the Ethics of Vision," reading, misreading and, ultimately, rereading are key acts within the Hitchcock oeuvre (97).
  5. ↑ Hitchcock's tempestuous relationship with his audience is well known. For discussions of Hitchcock and his audience, see Jean Douchet's article "Hitch and his Public" in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague's A Hitchcock Reader, Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films which examines how Hitchcock teaches people to "look"; and Stefan Sharff's The Art of Looking which sees Hitchcock as an auteur "making viewers more attentive by sharpening visual memory" (10).
  6. ↑ Within the field of film studies, some reject the director's role in creating or crafting a film, arguing rather that films are created and interpreted through ideology. Others, however, posit that the director does possess creative control over his/her text. For an excellent treatment of the latter, see Frank Tomasulo's essay "Narrate and Describe? Point of View and Narrative Voice in Citizen Kane's Thatcher Sequence."
  7. ↑ William Gray and Bernice Rogers argue that the focus on interpretation skills is a result of problems with 1930s "propaganda" whose "chief purpose [was] the confusion of the reader and the undermining of his loyalties" (5).
  8. ↑ Leading texts in the field of reading guidance include William Gray's ground-breaking Adjusting Reading Programs to Individuals (1941); Elizabeth Berry's Guiding Students in the English Class (1957); Louise Rosenblat's, "The Enriching Values of Reading," in Reading in AnAge of Man Communication, ed. William S. Gray (1949); and Robert J. Havighurst's Human Development and Education (1953).
  9. ↑ Significantly, postwar concerns about the effects of authoritarian reading guides is anticipated by Clement Greenberg's landmark Partisan Review essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939) in which he links cultural and political dissatisfaction and argues that totalitarian regimes like Stalinist Russia and fascist Italy encourage the embrace of "lesser" culture/art because it is a "natural" response that, in turn, helps to regulate the masses.
  10. ↑ Adler and Paterson's article thoroughly outlines the ways in which American anticommunists stridently elided fascism and communism in postwar America and played upon the residual effects of World War II in American consciousness. Examples of such elision can be found in J. Edgar Hoover's 1947 HUAC testimony in which he warned that "the mad march of Red fascism is a cause for concern" (1), or in his American Magazine article "Red Fascism in the United States Today" (1947). Similarly, Herbert L. Matthews' article "Fascism is not Dead" (1946) argues that Americans have foolishly tricked themselves into believing fascism and communism were two different entities when "they represented two factions within the same camp" (40). The "red fascist" campaign in both popular and political media was so complete that, as Carl Friedrich's "The Problem of Totalitarianism" demonstrates, the difference between Nazi fascism and Stalinist communism was "all but obliterated" by 1947 (2).
  11. ↑ Much excellent work has been done on the homosexual/heteronormative narrative of Rope. For example, see Truffaut's Hitchcock; Spoto's The Art of Alfred Hitchcock; Amy Lawrence's "American Shame: Rope, James Stewart, and the Postwar Crisis in American Masculinity"; D.A. Miller's "Anal Rope"; Wood's Hitchcock's Films; Durgnat's The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock; and Peter Wollen's "Rope: Three Hypotheses." See also Corber's discussion of the link between homosexuality and criminality in Cold War culture in In the Name of National Security.
  12. ↑ Brandon and Philip recognize the disjunction between Rupert's words and acts, claiming that by murdering David they have done what Rupert did not have the "guts" to do.
  13. ↑ Some critics have read this simply as a critique of intellectualism. Donald Spoto argues that "the possibility of sterile bookishness leading to depravity is not, therefore, merely Rope's subtexr; it is the major concern. Learning is useless without experience ... and the books given to the dead man's father, tied with the very instrument of death, link sterile learning (of the sort Rupert Cadell offered) with destruction" (170-71). The terms employed by Spoto—sterile, bookishness, and depravity strike a haunting chord with those employed during the anti-communist purges within the State Department and in other political rhetoric of the Cold War. The attacks made on New Dealers, Alger Hiss, and other public intellectual figures, reductively equated intellectualism with murder and disloyalty. However, rather than appealing to morally charged words such as "sterile" and "depraved," I read the film and Spoto's discussion of it in terms of the difference between "looking" and "reading." Spoto discusses "sterile bookishness" as "reading" and passivity. If one is to read sterility at all in the film, it is in merely looking and not attempting to understand that such passive impotence exists.
  14. ↑ See Thomas Hemmeter's "Twisted Writing: Rope as an Experimental Film" for a discussion of the way in which the Rope problematizes meaning making because, ultimately, one cannot control language.
  15. ↑ Rupert's rejection of controversy anticipates Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s centrist manifesto The Vital Center by one year. Like Rupert, Schlesinger's "re-examination and self-criticism" lead him toward a centrist position (vii). His "report" mirrors the catalogue of philosophical misunderstanding that Rupert provides at the close of Rope. Rupert's repentant intellectual who was unable to foresee the dark and destructive results of his ideological positioning is strikingly similar to many of the figures described by The Vital Center. Whereas Schlesinger associates the peripheries with darkness, lawlessness, and incomprehensibility, he links the center to both morality and individual integrity.

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